Honky - Paperback

by Dalton Conley (Author)

This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy's coming of age in 1970s New York--now with a new epilogue.

"I am not your typical middle-class white male," begins Dalton Conley's Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister's burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life--as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors.

In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants' respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven't) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.

Back Jacket

With precision and poetry, this ... absorbing volume [gives] readers a rare opportunity for insight into the complexities of race in America.--San Francisco Chronicle

"A must read for thinking adults."--The Washington Post

"A wonderful book. . . A triumph."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

"An eye-opening account of what it is like to grow up white in a black inner-city social environment. It is marvelously rich with insights--and a good read, too."--Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

"Americans have a tough time admitting two things about themselves: Race matters. Class matters. Dalton Conley's journey back and forth across the dividing lines invisibly etched on the map of Manhattan does with good story-telling what good sociology can't. He closes the sale. Through the eyes of a growing child he shows the difficulty of navigating without a map, the hard-won mastery of the unwritten rules. Young Dalton is bewildered by what most of us peers can't even perceive, the easy acceptance of white privilege. But instead of making a whiny tirade out of it, he makes us smell the street. It's a much more effective choice, if you ask me."--Ray Suarez, author of The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration

"Honky is dope. For all you white kids that grew up in Hip-Hop dominated America, this book is for you. It's a hard honest look at why, no matter how poor and ghetto you are or want to be, as long as you're white, you've still got an advantage in this country. . .very brave."--Danny Hoch, producer and star of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop

"I love Honky -- Dalton Conley is a very clever fellow to have strip-mined material so close to home and come up with pure gold. Told within the narrative framework of a white boy's friendships in the minority projects where his liberal, artistic parents raised their family in conditions that came to resemble a fortress, this ruefully comic memoir of growing up fast in the city easily outdistances a dozen sociological treatises on the deep social clashes and warring values of our time."--Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Author Biography

Dalton Conley is Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty affiliate of the New York Genome Center.